


i’ll love you like i’ve never been afraid

by ahana



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Episode Tag: S04 E01, F/M, basically the first chapter is an episode tag and then i switch things up a bit, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:47:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26149678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahana/pseuds/ahana
Summary: Veronica is still silent. She hasn’t turned around to look at him. The ring is still pinched between her fingers. Logan slowly rests his forehead on her shoulder, hoping that his entire world wasn’t about to crumble down in front of him.“You’ve had this since Spain?” she asks, incredulously.
Relationships: Logan Echolls/Veronica Mars
Comments: 25
Kudos: 50





	i’ll love you like i’ve never been afraid

**Author's Note:**

> So, I actually liked that in canon, V said no when Logan proposed. I thought that was totally in character for her and really liked seeing how it was going to affect their relationship. But, I didn’t like the way they ended up deciding to get married so this is a weird what-if canon divergence fic born from that dissatisfaction and from various shower thoughts. 
> 
> I'm posting the first chapter because I've been sitting on this one-shot since March and I just want to find a way to get back into this story and see it through. So, I split it! Also, I literally haven't read this for months (!!), so apologies for any mistakes! 
> 
> Title is from Little Do You Know by Alex and Sierra.

It’s small, tiny really. It fits in the palm of his hand and when he makes a fist, he can’t even feel it. A gold band and a square stone. It is practically weightless. His mother would have gawked at how unspectacular it is, but after the first time he saw it, he couldn’t stop picturing it the whole day. 

He remembered going back to the hotel room that night and just staring at Veronica’s bare left hand. He had watched her fingers as they held up a fork, played with the buttons on the remote and lingered on his arms. He couldn’t stop rubbing his thumb over her finger as she slept, picturing the little red stone in the center. 

Logan had gone back to the shop the very next day and spent a few hundred more euros than he had expected. The old lady was a good haggler, he’d give her that, but he’d figured when he worked up the guts to do the whole down-on-one-knee shebang, it would all be worth it. 

When she finally put the ring in a box and passed it over to him, he remembered not being able to touch it. It was going to connect him to Veronica for the rest of their lives. Such an important purpose for such a tiny thing. After a few minutes of hesitating, the old lady had probably gotten tired of him and simply pushed it in his hands, telling him he was too late to be afraid now. The shop had a no-returns policy. 

He can hear her say it now, clear as day, as he listens to Veronica unzip his bag.

She does it every time he comes back -- snoop through his pockets and clothes, that is. It’s funny that she thinks he doesn’t know what she does, looking for signs to prove where he was and what danger he might have been in. It’s also funny that she searches even when she knows he is smart enough to not carry anything critical when he’s coming home to her.

“There’s sand in your bag!” she gasps. “I knew you were in the Middle East.”

“Or,” Logan says, smirking as he plucks the toothpaste out of its holder. “I hate to bring up Occam’s razor here, but... maybe I set my bag down on the beach twenty feet outside our front door.” 

“No, this feels like Kuwaiti sand.” 

Despite his stomach twisting itself in knots in fear of what’s going to happen when she zips open the right pocket, Logan has to stamp down his growing smile at her quip and steps out of the bathroom. 

“You know, you really shouldn’t be digging through the bag of a Naval Intelligence Officer.” 

Veronica’s got her back to him, her wet hair making the back of her white shirt basically useless. She’s sitting on the floor and he can just about see the frame of her body hunched over his bag in the minimal lighting aesthetic they’ve got going on. For a split second, he wonders if he should just distract her and do this some other time. This is too domestic, too minuscule of a moment. People pull out all kinds of rabbits from their hats when it comes to proposals. Hell, his buddy wouldn’t stop bragging for months about how he proposed to his partner in Disneyland. Shae had asked Wallace to marry her at the top of the Empire State Building. Fuck, Logan should have thought this through. 

“That’s what you say you are.” Veronica exhales, faux-painfully. “I’m still thinking you’re an international playboy breaking hearts in exotic lands.” 

“Sounds like you should lock me down.” 

_ Fuck _ , he thinks.  _ Oh, motherfucking fuck in hell. _

He didn’t mean to say that. He really didn’t mean to quip his way through his own fucking proposal. He walks back into the bathroom, wondering how quietly he can slam his head into the mirror. 

“Be careful.” Veronica’s tone is still light as she continues to zip through more pockets and bags. Logan can hear the sound of what he assumes is his toiletries bag. “Some girls might think you’re proposing marriage.” 

Oh, fuck. Alright. _ Here we go.  _

“Or, in words you can understand,” she continues and then drops her voice to mimic a fight sequence in a video game. “An Echolls ultimatum.” 

Logan’s still staring at himself in the mirror. In a split second, it feels like he can see every single year of his life speed by in the reflection. He’s four and he’s standing behind his mother, watching her put some cream on her face in front of the vanity mirror. He’s nine and he’s in his bathroom trying to figure out how to explain his broken teeth to his dad. He’s thirteen and he’s trying to see if the belt marks on his back look bad enough to skip Duncan’s pool party. He’s sixteen and he just punched his mirror because Veronica abandoned him. On and on and on, he sees himself until he’s back to the present. He’s thirty-three and about to ask the love of his life to marry him.

“Nah, you had it the first time. Marriage. I just… forgot what it was called.” 

He takes a deep breath in and his fingers tighten around his toothbrush. 

“Let’s get married,” he says, as if the idea just struck him. Like he hasn’t been picturing it since he was eighteen and like he hasn’t been carrying a ring with him for over a year. 

There’s a snort from the living room. 

“Yeah, okay weirdo. Let’s get married.” 

“I’m serious,” Logan says softly. Is it that hard for her to believe that he could seriously want to marry her? Or is the idea of marriage still so preposterous to her? 

The last time they talked about marriage, Veronica had just solved a stalker case that she had gotten emotionally invested in. The client’s stalker situation had turned into a rapist situation within days and Veronica, on par for the course, had taken the blame on herself for not being able to solve the case in time. It didn’t matter that she had caught her suspect, the client’s ex-husband, six days later and he ended up going to prison for three years. 

She couldn’t sleep for weeks on end. Sometimes she’d make her way to the couch and watch late night infomercials, and other times she’d sit on the floor of their bedroom and read through the case file over and over again under a flashlight. Logan didn’t know what to say to her and he didn’t know how to help her. He’d sit with her, hold her hand or touch her calves, but Veronica was stuck inside her head. She twitched frequently and startled easily. The bags under her eyes became bigger and her face was in a perpetual state of splotchiness.

Two weeks in, he got called to D.C. for six days and Veronica convinced him she’d sleep at her dad’s house. She was a Mars and they had award-winning bounce-back abilities, she told him. For that week, she put up a good show over the phone and on Skype. She had Logan believing that she was actually feeling better, till he showed up a day early and found her on the bedroom floor again. This time, she was surrounded by the trinkets that decorated their apartment. She was holding onto a picture frame of the two of them at the beach and wiping it frantically with a Clorox wipe. When he tried to pry them from her hands, she held on tighter until she finally began to cry. They sat there for hours while Veronica sobbed. She took the next day off from work and they just sat in bed, talking and holding each other. 

She had brought up marriage first. He still doesn’t remember how they landed on the topic. 

Veronica talked about how every marriage she had witnessed had crumbled around her and a small, horrible part of her was just waiting for it to happen to Shae and Wallace, so she could be prepared to help her best friend. Logan tried to show her that there were many examples outside of their little bubble where marriages worked. Mac’s parents made it work. So many of his colleagues and friends are making it work. It took effort, respect and love, but it was possible. After a while, she partially conceded. Yes, some marriages worked great, but the world they chose to live in was not built to sustain normal lives, so how could she just let go and trust a piece of paper?

Logan hadn’t had an answer to that. He just blindly trusted Veronica. It was simple as that for him and he didn’t know how to explain it to her. So, he tried to show her every day since. 

“If you were serious,” Veronica says, now, from the living room. “You’d be in the same room as your intended and there’d be a ring involved. Or, so I’m told.” 

_ Moment of truth, Echolls. Get your shit together.  _

He walks back out and leans on the doorway for support. She’s still making her way through the items in the main pocket of his bag.

“How many pockets have you searched?”

He watches her hands still over his bag and then pull away like it was a live wire. She whips around to face him and he can’t read the expression on her face. She looks… shocked? Petrified? Angry? Happy? 

Logan’s lost. 

“The pocket on the right.” He points with the toothbrush in his hand as a drop of froth falls on the floor. 

He watches her put one of his chargers back in its little bag and shove a hand into the right pocket. It’s empty except for the one ring rolling around at the bottom. He knows. He’s checked a million times.

She pulls it out and, for the first time, the little ruby on the ring catches the dull light in the room and gleams. 

As he kneels behind her, watching her taking in the ring, he flashes back to every time he would pull it out of his bag before going to sleep and just stare at it the same way. It didn’t matter what country he was in, how much sleep he needed to get or who was watching him. The emotions he felt fingering the gold band never changed. 

Once during their first year at Hearst, before everything went downhill, Logan decided to take Veronica out to a fancy meal. They didn’t really do things like that -- Logan having done the whole fancy thing when he was a minor under his asshole of a father, and Veronica having stubbornly rejected anything to do with the word fancy -- but he figured why not give it a try. He picked her up from her apartment and took her to some ostentatious French restaurant in the ‘09. By the time they were seated, he could see Veronica fidgeting in her seat. He tried to get them to last through the appetizers, but honestly, who was he kidding?

They finally settled on a burger picnic at Dog Beach. Logan read a book he kept in his car and Veronica finished some Crim homework. When the sun began to set, they waded into the water. Veronica tried to carry Logan so his pants wouldn’t get wet but ended up dropping them both in the ocean two seconds later. When he pulled her up by her waist, her face plunged out of the water and she smiled this big, toothy smile at him, like there was nowhere else she would’ve rather been -- completely soaked, lipstick smudged and coughing up water. 

They tried to go back to the restaurant two years ago, but they had grossly overestimated their patience with small servings and unpronounceable dishes. By the time the sun began disappearing in the sky, they ended up at the exact same beach, with Veronica soaked and smiling in the water again.

The stone reminded him of that lipstick smile and the ring was Veronica in every way another thing could be. Small, fiery, gentle and a surprise. He basically carried her around with him for fourteen months. Sometimes in his lockers, sometimes around his dog tags but mostly in his bag. 

“Logan --”

“I know.” Logan gulps before continuing, “Believe me, Veronica, I know. But I saw this in the window of that little antiques shop in Madrid and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Or you. Or it  _ on  _ you.”

Veronica just breathes, motionless in front of him. All the hairs on the back of her neck have stood up and her mouth is hanging open. The ring is still pinched between her fingers. Logan slowly rests his forehead on her shoulder, hoping that his entire world wasn’t about to crumble down in front of him. 

“You’ve had this since Spain?” she asks, incredulously. 

He nods against her shoulder. His eyes are closed and his right hand is wringing the flesh near his ankle. 

“W-T-C dude?” she breathes out eventually. Logan can feel the shaky inhale she takes in. 

She holds the ring out to him with her thumb and index finger clutching the band. Is it a rejection? Is this her saying no?

His chin is still on her shoulder and the tremors in her body echo in his. Without looking at Veronica, he places a feather-light kiss on her shoulder and slides himself back. He adjusts himself so he’s sitting on his heels. He had a whole speech prepared but he can’t recall a single word right now. 

She speaks first, though.

“I can’t-”

Veronica gets to her feet in a flash and backs away from Logan, almost like she’s afraid. 

“I need to go-”

Patting her pockets, she turns around, fumbling, while she slips her feet into her sandals. 

“- meet my dad at the -”

She grabs her bag off the little hook Logan installed last summer. 

“- city council meeting. I promised him I would ‘cause-” 

The door is pulled open. 

“-big stuff is happening and it could affect -” 

She looks at him one last time, a fleeting glance, and then she’s gone, ring still trapped in her hand. 


End file.
